There are hundreds of millions of Wi-Fi access points in the world today, serving billions of devices. To an increasing extent these access points are being used not only to provide access to Local Area Networks, but also to provide carrier-class data communication services e.g. for offloading Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. IEEE 802.11 however was not originally designed as a carrier-grade radio access technology and lacks some functionality necessary to ensure a high average session quality of experience in a carrier context. For example IEEE 802.11 assumes that the device will handle network and access point selection.
One problem may be that some devices have not been engineered with large-scale communication systems in mind and may select access points and networks poorly when presented with more choices than is typical in a residential or corporate Wi-Fi context.
One problem may be that the device may not have information about the state of the network, e.g. the current load on various network elements, and may therefore select networks and access points in a manner leading to suboptimal performance for the mobile user.
One problem may be that the device may not have information about the traffic flow in the network or the associated costs for the service provider, and may therefore select networks and access points in a, for the mobile user or their service provider, economically suboptimal manner.
One problem may be that some access points may have an important primary function, e.g. providing access to a Local Area Network; that the mobile device's potential use of said access point is for a less important secondary purpose; and that the mobile device's selection of the access point may negatively impact users of the primary function.
Furthermore, it may seem that a simple fixed bandwidth limit for mobile devices would be sufficient to prevent negative impact to users of the primary function but this is unfortunately not the case. The average radio link quality for mobile devices tends to be quite low and large amounts of spectrum are therefore consumed even at modest throughput. Unless radio resources are carefully managed a mobile device can severely impact the user experience of a residential subscriber even at low data rates.
For example, it would not be uncommon for a mobile device to have such a low quality radio link that its maximum unthrottled throughput would be just 1 Mbps, or even less. A primary user of the access point that normally enjoys throughput of up to 50 Mbps would then be severely impacted even if mobile device's bandwidth use is quite low. Table 3 and table 4 provide some examples.
While prior art IEEE 802.11 communication systems that control access point selection (but not network selection) in a corporate Wi-Fi context exist these have poor scalability in a carrier Wi-Fi context. One reason may be that they attempt to tightly control access point selection requiring extensive synchronization between large numbers of access points. One reason may be that they do not efficiently use the distributed processing power of access points and mobile devices. These prior art systems typically scale only to thousands of access points. The technology disclosed here in contrast moderates both access point and network selection, without extensive synchronization, and scales to millions of access points, and beyond.
Furthermore, while prior art systems that solve or attempt to solve the problems above using custom software installed on the mobile device these systems typically lead to poor subscriber uptake and service provider economics. One reason may be that few subscribers go through the trouble of installing the custom software. One reason may be that the service provider must maintain and distribute custom software for a large number of different mobile device platforms.
There is thus a need for a scalable manner of moderating the access point and network selection of a mobile communications terminal.